Next Year in Fandom: Da Resolutions

You know that great Yogi Berra quote, the one I’m literally about to make up right now? “Nothing bonds to you a sports organization like winning and losing.” That one?

If you write down literally anything I say during our legendary 3-hour phone calls, you’ll agree that one of my all-timers this year was about how you go places in this world looking to feel one thing and then end up feeling something else … Granted I didn’t say it quite like that, but surely the one place you get to rewrite history any way you want is your own damn blog.

You go to New York to die at Yankee Stadium like you always said you would, and then yield inexplicable tears during a last-minute or last last-decision trip to Citi Field. You visit White Hart Lane fully expecting to drop 3 points, but don’t expect the vibes in the stands to be quite so pedestrian … You say you’re done with it all, the terrible football, the derby day embarrassments, the sporadic press, and Richarlison’s first touch, and then a Chelsea supporter (of all the demons) talks you off the ledge near Euston.

Sports aren’t what we make of them on TV, and neither are athletes; and the degree to which we mythologise both has enabled me to finally come full-circle. To accept myself, and my particular handful of flawed, greedy sports organisations, for what we truly are: representatives – accidentally or inherently – of the cities that we love.

Here’re my resolutions, kid, for sports in 2026.

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1: I will accept Tottenham Hotspur for who they are, in all their unabashed and mostly unrealised glory.

This team, more than any other on my ‘stack’, has reminded me of the bonding power of suffering. How you remember devastating losses at the hands of sworn rivals, just as much as you remember the sparkling victories, for the spiritual wounds that remind you you can’t, and probably shouldn’t, have everything you want in this world.

I will remember that fiend Eberechi Eze’s hat-trick in the North London derby just as much as I will remember Micky Van De Ven’s goalline clearance in the Europa League final, and it will remind me of my life’s guiding principle: Better Dead than Red.

2: I will thank the good Lord, every ball game, for making me a Yankee.

I have returned in a daze, from a vacation around baseball history. I would still very much like to visit Wrigley Field in the summer, and thereby communicate to Cubs fans somehow that I understand. I have dipped my finger in the Mets experience, and their shiny stadium, and their hot dogs, and I have revelled in their bright colour palette – but gawddamnit I’m a New York Yankee.

I have watched Aaron Judge evolve into the greatest hitter in the game. I have decorated my chambers at odd hours with the nostalgic sound of the YES network jingle, every time I’ve been awake to catch an evening game. I have walked among the pinstripe army in the house that Ruth built. I have enjoyed George Costanza receiving one verbal shellacking after another from the late Mr. Steinbrenner, and I have mourned the loosening of the facial hair policy. I will be spending my next Opening Day as I’ve spent all my Opening Days, rooting for the Evil Empire, and cursing once the season is up and running at any banana-peel fielding.

3: I will wait patiently for the Giants rebuild to crystallize, I will pay more attention to defense in general, and I will merely admire the offensive pizzazz of other franchises.

I am now bonded to this curious franchise in New Jersey, which is sometimes a football superpower and sometimes a meandering asteroid, by highly specific moments of pain: Malik Nabers missing more football, Cam Skattebo’s foreleg twisting entirely the other way, and Jaxson Dart being slammed to the ground so hard he lost a fucking tooth.

In 2025 I watched the New York football Giants give up several leads in several scintillating games, and I’m here for it moving forward: the head coaching search ahead, the draft process come spring, and the reunion of that aforementioned offensive core. (PLEASE RE-SIGN WAN’DALE ROBINSON, I DON’T ASK FOR MUCH.)

I choose (gulp) the suffering.

4: I will visit Madison Square Garden, and ascend towards my home planet from there.

Now that I’ve resolved my whole baseball situation, perhaps a return visit to Da City is on the cards. To catch a healthy Aaron Judge this time, spend more time in Harlem, and actually visit the primary reason I’ve never once fallen out of love with the New York Knickerbockers: the gilded castle that is Madison Square Garden. (Try not to look up the history, etc.)

Thank you Jalen Brunson for making us a basketball force again. Thank you Karl Anthony Towns for embracing the journey back home, and for possessing maybe the cleanest form in the modern history of NBA big men. Thank you, Josh Hart, for leaving it all out on the floor, every single time. Thank you Mikhail Bridges and OG Anunoby and Miles McBride, for that dogged defense and those timely buckets. Thank you, Tyler Kolek, for having more than just a little motion. Thank you Walt Frazier, for the sideline dimes, and thank you Mike Breen, for all the bangs.

5: I will visit Tyneside and inform the locals my old man was one of them – and that I, in some small, irrelevant fashion, always will be as well.

Maybe the smartest thing I’ve done in the last couple of years – through the Mourinho, Conte and Postecoglu horror theme park rides – is allow myself to check in on my dad’s team whenever things turn irreversible in North London. One day, if London ever calls, I should like to just randomly hop on trains headed North, stroll around St. James Park for inadvertent ages, and return home (to Camden) with poems about a different England. That would be mint, I reckon.

Happy New Year, lad :):):)